Comment by HPsquared
6 months ago
1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth.
2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.
Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate.
The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.
This is wrong because LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone (search style or banner ad style) for over 2 years now. And they are getting cheaper over time for the same quality.
It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API!
Zero chance all the users evaporate unless something much better comes along, or the tech is banned, etc...
> LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone
> It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API
These, uhhhh, these are some rather extraordinary claims. Got some extraordinary evidence to go along with them?
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The free tiers might be tough to sustain, but it’s hard to imagine that they are that problematic for OpenAI et al. GPUs will become cheaper, and smaller/faster models will reach the same level of capability.
[citation needed]
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> LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth.
I haven't seen that at all. I've seen a whole lot of top-down AI usage mandates, and every time what sounds like a sensible positive take comes along, it turns out to have been written by someone who works for an AI company.
That's funny, I remember seeing "IT" penetrate Mr. Garrison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK362RLHXGY
Hey, it still beats what you go through at the airports.